Than morn one dewdrop from her countless store,
Earth’s most neglected child, with trusting heart,
Call’d to the hope of glory, shall depart.’
“After some lines expressing the spirit of English patriotism, in a manner with which foreigners can only be pleased, the poem closes with the picture of a mother teaching her child the first lessons of religion, by holding up the divine example of the Saviour.
“We have been led into a longer notice of this poem, for it illustrates the character of Mrs Hemans’s manner. We perceive in it a loftiness of purpose, an earnestness of thought, sometimes made more interesting by a tinge of melancholy, a depth of religious feeling, a mind alive to all the interests, gratifications, and sorrows of social life.”—Professor Norton.
Edinburgh Monthly Review.—“We have on more than one occasion expressed the very high opinion which we entertain of the talents of this lady; and it is gratifying to find that she gives us no reason to retract or modify in any degree the applause already bestowed, and that every fresh exhibition of her powers enhances and confirms her claims upon our admiration. Mrs Hemans is indeed but in the infancy of her poetical career; but it is an infancy of unrivalled beauty, and of very high promise. Not but that she has already performed more than has often been sufficient to win for other candidates no mean place in the roll of fame, but because what she has already done shrinks, when compared with what we consider to be her own great capacity, to mere incipient excellence—the intimation rather than the fulfilment of the high destiny of her genius.
... “The verses of Mrs Hemans appear the spontaneous offspring of intense and noble feeling, governed by a clear understanding, and fashioned into elegance by an exquisite delicacy and precision of taste. With more than the force of many of her masculine competitors, she never ceases to be strictly feminine in the whole current of her thought and feeling, nor approaches by any chance the verge of that free and intrepid course of speculation, of which the boldness is more conspicuous than the wisdom, but into which some of the most remarkable among the female literati of our times have freely and fearlessly plunged. She has, in the poem before us, made choice of a subject of which it would have been very difficult to have reconciled the treatment, in the hands of some female authors, to the delicacy which belongs to the sex, and the tenderness and enthusiasm which form its finest characteristics. A coarse and chilling cento of the exploded fancies of modern scepticism, done into rhyme by the hand of a woman, would have been doubly disgusting, by the revival of absurdities long consigned to oblivion, and by the revolting exhibition of a female mind shorn of all its attractions, and wrapt in darkness and defiance. But Mrs Hemans has chosen the better and the nobler cause, and, while she has left in the poem before us every trace of vigorous intellect of which the subject admitted, and has far transcended in energy of thought the prosing pioneers of unbelief, she has sustained throughout a tone of warm and confiding piety, and has thus proved that the humility of hope and of faith has in it none of the weakness with which it has been charged by the arrogance of impiety, but owns a divine and mysterious vigour residing under the very aspect of gentleness and devotion.”
Quarterly Review.—“Her last two publications are works of a higher stamp; works, indeed, of which no living poet need to be ashamed. The first of them is entitled The Sceptic, and is devoted, as our readers will easily anticipate, to advocating the cause of religion. Undoubtedly the poem must have owed its being to the circumstances of the times—to a laudable indignation at the course which literature in many departments seemed lately to be taking in this country, and at the doctrines disseminated with industry, principally (but by no means exclusively, as has been falsely supposed) among the lower orders. Mrs Hemans, however, does not attempt to reason learnedly or laboriously in verse; few poems, ostensibly philosophical or didactic, have ever been of use, except to display the ingenuity and talent of the writers. People are not often taught a science or an art in poetry, and much less will an infidel be converted by a theological treatise in verse. But the argument of The Sceptic is one of irresistible force to confirm a wavering mind; it is simply resting the truth of religion on the necessity of it—on the utter misery and helplessness of man without it. This argument is in itself available for all the purposes of poetry: it appeals to the imagination and passions of man; it is capable of interesting all our affectionate hopes and charities, of acting upon all our natural fears. Mrs Hemans has gone through this range with great feeling and ability; and when she comes to the mind which has clothed itself in its own strength, and relying proudly on that alone in the hour of affliction, has sunk into distraction in the contest, she rises into a strain of moral poetry not often surpassed:—
‘Oh, what is nature’s strength? The vacant eye,
By mind deserted, hath a dread reply,’ etc.”]